Collation: Essays
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Collation: Essays A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy David M. Wanczyk June 2010 © 2010 David M. Wanczyk. All Rights Reserved. 2 This dissertation titled Collation: Essays by DAVID M. WANCZYK has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Dinty W. Moore Professor of English Benjamin M. Ogles Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 Abstract WANCZYK, DAVID M., Ph.D, June 2010, English Collation: Essays (174 pp.) Director of Dissertation: Dinty W. Moore This dissertation is a collection of creative essays preceded by a critical introduction that defines what the author calls “The Aesthetic of Friendship.” That essay explores the work of Mary Karr, Edward Hoagland, Patricia Foster, Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, and David Foster Wallace, with particular focus on writer- reader connection. The ten creative essays that follow explore issues of family influence and empathy (and also love, and chili, and college theater, and nuclear power). Approved: _____________________________________________________________ Dinty W. Moore Professor of English 4 Acknowledgments I thank the following for their constructive criticism and generosity: David Burton, Mark Halliday, Carey Snyder; and Dinty W. Moore, my dissertation director, whose encouragement has been invaluable. Thanks also to my colleagues and teachers in creative writing and English for their patience, enthusiasm, and wonderful work. They are: Holly Baker, Josie Bloomfield, Jaswinder Bolina, Rachel Burgess, Robert Cording, Amanda Dambrink, Barbara Duncan, Marsha Dutton, Joey Franklin, Diana Hume George, S. David Grover, Barb Grueser, Mike Jaynes, Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, Megan Lobsinger, Joe McLaughlin, Kate Nuernberger, Rachael Peckham, Jill Rosser, Liz Stephens, Steve Vineberg, and, with an asterisk of heightened appreciation, *Catherine C. Taylor. To my ostensible editor, the estimable pal J. Zachary Kessler, I leave my baseball card collection; and to Joe Plicka—my great friend—I promise an endless supply of experimental burritos. Rob Strong, grey-eyed traveller, thank you, too. Familial love to Bob, Jean, Stephen, and C.J. Wanczyk; Les, Joan, and Marc Sheehan. Most of all, my superlative super-appreciation to Megan T.S. Wanczyk for being hilarious and optimistic, for accepting strange gifts with grace, for buying me V-8, and for having the seventh best laugh in recorded human history. Je vous ai écrit une lettre, vous avez voyagé à l'Ohio, et maintenant (je ne parle pas la langue comme vous le savez), laissez-nous toujours être assis ensemble, mentalement, à l'intérieur du Reine des Tartes 5 Table of Contents Page Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3 Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... 4 Introduction: Let's Be Friends. Please: The Cajoled Connection of Personal Writing ....... 6 Co-Stars ............................................................................................................................. 50 Bloodlines ......................................................................................................................... 64 Stations .............................................................................................................................. 81 Kin..................................................................................................................................... 86 Collation ............................................................................................................................ 96 The Father ....................................................................................................................... 114 Tagging ........................................................................................................................... 117 EB:47 .............................................................................................................................. 123 Take ................................................................................................................................. 145 Nuclear Family................................................................................................................ 151 6 Introduction: Let's Be Friends. Please: The Cajoled Connection of Personal Writing I I believe (don't you?) that the success of nonfiction writing—personal essays and memoir in particular—relies on the connection a writer can make with a reader, a connection that, in the words of noted personal essayist Phillip Lopate, makes a reader feel “a little less lonely and freakish” (xxxiii). So much, then, depends on the affability of the writer-character. Readers need to be drawn into a deep relationship with this person in order to stomach essays and memoirs that may, at first glance, seem self- centered. Beyond merely relating the story, then—of a death in the family, of a first love, of a religious doubt, of a particular yen for tuna fish sandwiches—nonfiction writers must project, within the telling of those stories, some sense of themselves and some sense that they can offer a small, but necessary insight. This is a tall order. We all have personalities, opinions, prejudices, quirks, perversions. Who's to say mine, or Joan Didion's, or Jonathan Franzen's, or Bret Lott's are worth a reader's time? Almost everybody's got a family, some inner sadness, a couple of really absurd tales of travel and discovery. Who's to say mine are the ones you should ponder? At least fiction most often has a definite narrative to follow. At least poetry has compact, lyrical language and the surprising jolts that the short-form allows. The knock against personal writing, though, is that all it's got going for it is me, me, me. This is the personal writer's cross. We're all afraid, I think, that, like actors, we'll create a character, go on stage, and 7 be pelted with tomatoes by our restless audience. We'll navel-gaze and, finding the lint there to be of a particularly vibrant hue, fail to look outward, ever. We'll over-describe those key moments of our lives, those fresh explosions of our consciousnesses, without realizing that what we're writing remains inaccessible to everyone else. While the essayist's question as first conceived by Michel de Montaigne in the sixteenth century was “What do I know?,” the essayist's question now has to be “Who could ever care?” So, we need to be conscious, always, that there is an issue in our essays, something at stake. At the very least, we need to impart a striking scene or an unconventional story. We need to write toward unexpected, hard-earned turns of thought, while including how we arrived at those turns. All of this effort can seem futile, though, if we create a persona that's unlikable, unaware, immature, humorless. Because that persona—as he confronts a troubling issue or a jarring thought—is the subject. And he needs to be a skilled tour- guide of his own life for the reader. Personal nonfiction writing, then, is a performance of the self meeting itself, meeting the world, and shaping those encounters in such a way that he can meet another lonely, freakish person. No other writing is so reliant on the writer-reader relationship, and that's what excites and haunts me about this genre. Like in acting, making the art becomes about being a believable person, a person who is, if not likable, then at least compelling. It's about letting the audience empathize. And though we can like performances and essays by people we don't relate to, we can't, I don't think, like performances and essays by people we don't care about. To make readers care, then, we often try to make them our friends. 8 Writers like Mary Karr, Edward Hoagland, Robert Louis Stevenson, Patricia Foster, Virginia Woolf, and David Foster Wallace seem to create with this writer-reader relationship in mind, and their work exemplifies what I want to call The Aesthetic of Friendship. They invite us into their written lives in many ways—with their senses of humor, their idiosyncratic images, their magnetic curiosity; but in this essay I will focus on three techniques that help them and other writers develop intimacy with readers. First, Karr and Hoagland, as I'll explore below, use their unsentimental styles to relay the cringe-inducing details of their lives. In doing so they show us enough vulnerability to earn our trust without eliciting our pity. We feel welcomed because of their frankness. Likewise, Stevenson and Foster both welcome us into their thought processes by writing from a position of ambivalence; because they're likably unsure about the topics they address—marriage, race—we can become part of their inner conversations as we feel our own opinions challenged. Honesty and ambivalence are key stances, then, but I personally feel most invited into an essay when a writer takes up empathy itself as a central issue, as Woolf and Wallace do. While they explore the difficulty of connecting with other people, while they forge friendships within their essays, they show us, I think, how we can try to meet them on the page. These three techniques—appealing honesty, productive ambivalence, and the dramatization of empathy—are the hallmarks of The Aesthetic of Friendship, of the specific tradition that stands as